"The mayor and I talked about it and thought perhaps it'd be a good idea if I went aboard," Mario Pellegrini remembered. It was 11pm on 13 January and the life of the tall, strongly built deputy mayor of Giglio was about to change forever. The first lifeboats from the stricken Costa Concordia had just reached the island's tiny port.

Before long, another Italian, the captain of the liner, Francesco Schettino, would gain notoriety by abandoning his ship. Pellegrini headed in the opposite direction.

"The lifeboat returned to the starboard side of the vessel and I climbed aboard up a rope ladder." That alone would have daunted a lesser man. He reckoned it was a climb of between 10 and 15 metres.

Like most of the islanders, Pellegrini owns a boat. But he is a landlubber at heart. "There are two sorts of islanders – those from fishing backgrounds and those from farming backgrounds. I belong to the latter," he said.

Once aboard the liner, Pellegrini began helping the crew to get people into the lifeboats. At that stage, the ship was listing only slightly. When most of the passengers had been evacuated, he set off for the port decks. As he made his way across, the Costa Concordia tipped over.

"It was my good luck to be slammed against a wall," he said. Others were catapulted down corridors running athwart the ship or hurled from the starboard decks into the sea.

Pellegrini helped some of the people in the corridor to reach the port decks, which were now above them, before he and two members of the crew turned their attention to a group of people who had been thrown down a passageway that was rapidly becoming a well.

"You could hear the water coming in from below," he said.

One by one, they pulled the imperilled passengers and crew members out of the corridor on a rope. Pellegrini said he had several gaps in his memory of that dreadful night, but he remembered one detail very clearly: "The first ones we brought out were soaked to the waist. But the later ones – the last five or six – were drenched up to their necks. Those we really did save from death."

Pellegrini spent the rest of the night helping people slither down the hull and into lifeboats before assisting in the helicopter rescue of a woman with a broken leg. He eventually left the Costa Concordia "at about five in the morning".

Ashore, he met another member of the Giglio island council. "I said: 'It's over'. I didn't realise that it was actually just beginning."

Nearly a year later, the vast, 114,000-tonne vessel is still lying on its side a few metres from the shore: a tourist attraction for some; an eyesore and headache for the islanders, and particularly their local authority representatives.

"There is always some problem," said Pellegrini. "I've had to neglect my family and my work."

First came the rescuers, looking first for survivors, then for bodies. Then the salvagers arrived to begin the biggest ship recovery ever attempted.

"The pressure on the council has been great," he said. And then corrected himself: "Immense."

Just before Christmas, there was a public meeting at which the islanders were to be given an update on the salvage operation by officials from the regional government. It was originally scheduled for completion in January. Now the salvagers are aiming for summer. Until then, Pellegrini's life will be dominated by the need to provide them with bureaucratic assistance, while coping with the other effects of the disaster. The 2012 turnover at the hotel he runs was down 40%.

"Some of that is no doubt due to the recession, but not all of it. We get some people who come over to see the wreck. But we've lost clients who stayed a week."

Had he received any recognition for what he had done on the night of the disaster or since?

"From the state, no, nothing," he said. But his contribution had been recognised and praised by his fellow islanders. And there were other compensations: dealing with the "fantastic people" who came to Giglio as rescuers and salvagers, and meeting the survivors who from time to time turned up in the small port.

One was a Latin American crew member who had been among those trapped in the corridor-well. Seeing her on the quayside, he approached and told her he had been there when she was hauled to safety. She looked at him blankly. And then, not without a touch of pride, she said: "I was rescued by the deputy mayor."